Mark Hamill to direct something that could be The Black Pearl

Posted by LiveFor on April 20, 2010

No not Captain Jack Sparrow’s ship. I’ll get to the Pearl in a bit.

Mark Hamill (Star Wars, Batman: The Animated Series) was talking at the Los Angeles Comedy Shorts Festival and mentioned a project that he’d been trying to get off the ground for some time. However, he couldn’t go into details but would announce it at the Cannes Film Festival.

He did drop some hints thought – it’s based on a comic book that Hamill wrote, it’s set in the real world, and “at first glance it’s a drama, but it has dark humor.”

Like The Wrap I think they are talking about his 1996 comic book miniseries The Black Pearl which was originally written as a screenplay before being turned into a comic. Eric Johnson was co-writer on the comic.

Hamill described the tale as “a crime thriller, fairly raw in terms of violence … about tabloid journalism and sensationalism and all the things that thrillers come from.”

He went on to say that they had got a $7 million budget for the film that he will be directing.

“My two co-writers wrote a David O. Russell film for Paramount,” he said, “and now they’ve very hot. So now there are people who are willing to give us $30 million to make the movie. But if we took that deal, I wouldn’t get to direct.

“If you go over about $8 million, you have to start getting foreign sales before you start shooting. But if you stay in the $5-to-$7 million range, you don’t have to do presales and you can maintain much more creative control.”

The goal, he says, is “to make a movie the studios wouldn’t make.”

I remember reading the first couple of issues of the Dark Horse miniseries – mad to think that it is 14 years old – I enjoyed what I read of the story, the main character was a bit of a sod if I remember, but I was unable to get hold of the last 3 issues so never found out what happened. It was ahead of its time considering Kick-Ass and the other non-superhero superhero comics and films that have come out recently. Of course it might not be The Black Pearl that they are talking about.

Would be good to see what Hamill does directing the film and if anything I reckon the small budget will make the film better. They’ll make sure that every penny counts.